Writing Memoirs, Making Friendships

While attending a music high school in Norway, Maiken Fjeldberg '13 faced the heavy criticism from a male guitar instructor who believed women were inferior guitarists. The constant judgment wore her down, but it also inspired the young musician to work harder. She practiced until her fingers bled, getting an A on her exam.

When it came time to write about this experience, as a memoir writing assignment for her English 112 course for international students, Fjelberg needed just the opposite inspiration - kind, motivating words to help her craft her story.

She received just that.

Fjelberg was one of eight international students in an English course taught by Dr. Amy Watkin, who partnered with Dr. Joan Kopperud's Reading Writing Methods course. The students first teamed up to read and discuss a memoir. Then, the education students mentored the international students through the process of writing their own memoirs. They read them aloud during an Author's Chair breakfast at the end of the semester.

"As future teachers, this project has not only given my students firsthand experience with planning and teaching," Kopperud says, "but the project also has provided an opportunity to develop friendships."

NSF Grant Funds New Equipment

Students in Dr. Mark Jensen's chemistry labs are gaining real-world experiences using research equipment purchased with a $150,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

"We want our students to think and act like scientists," says Jensen. "Now we'll be better equipped to give them experiences that allow them to do just that."

The new instruments are an inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometer (ICP-AES), which simultaneously detects and determines concentrations of several elements, and an ion chromatograph (IC), which is used to determine metal concentrations in water. An automated high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) system efficiently separates and quantifies components in liquids.

The ICP-AES pinpoints materials being tested into fingerprints of light, which reveal what elements are in the materials and how much.

"We can detect elements in very low levels," says Jensen. "We now have merged technologies into a very powerful instrument that is used in leading-edge research and commercial applications."